Co-Directors:
Emily Robins Sharpe (Keene State) is Assistant Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member of the departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. She is at work on a book manuscript examining hemispheric Anglophone responses to the Spanish Civil War. She is also the editor of a scholarly edition of Hugh Garner’s Governor General’s Award-winning Best Stories (1963), and co-editor with Bart Vautour of a scholarly edition of Charles Yale Harrison’s Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), both from the University of Ottawa Press.
Bart Vautour (Dalhousie) is Assistant Professor (LTA) in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. His research examines Canadian cultural production with a focus on transnationalism, modernism, politics, poetics, and editing. He is co-editor (with Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn) of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics and (with Vanessa Lent and Dean Irvine) Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media. He is also editor of a scholarly edition of Ted Allan’s Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939) and co-editor of Charles Yale Harrison’s Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), both from the University of Ottawa Press.
Project Manager:
Kaarina Mikalson is a PhD student in English at Dalhousie University. She completed her MA at the University of Alberta, where she wrote a thesis on Canadian fiction from the Great Depression, including Ted Allan's Spanish Civil War novel This Time a Better Earth. She came to the project as a graduate research intern, and has contributed case study's on Canadian pro-Republican pamphlets and Mac-Pap William Kardash's electoral campaign. She is currently co-editing, with Bart Vautour and Dean Irvine, a new scholarly edition of Dorothy Livesay's Right Hand Left Hand.
Current and Former Graduate Research Interns:
Emily Murphy (Queens) is a Ph.D. candidate at Queen's University. Her dissertation studies representations of women and mental illness in the modernist period in the United States and Europe. Her primary authors include Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Laura Riding. She has particular focus on popular culture and mass-produced periodicals; this focus entails a reliance on such distant reading Digital Humanities practices as Topic Modelling and Social Network Analysis. Since the summer of 2014, she has co-taught TEI Fundamentals at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and Digital Humanities Theory and Practice at the Bader International Study Centre at Herstmonceux Castle, UK. Emily recently presented on James Joyce, Nancy Cunard, and the Digital Humanities at the James Joyce International Symposium. Her first publication, "Beckett's everyday psychopathology: Reading male nervous hysteria in Murphy," is forthcoming in issue 40.1 of English Studies in Canada.
Jane Boyes holds a MA from the Department of English at Dalhousie University. Her interest in Canadian modernism and issues of social justice has served her well in her capacity as a research assistant for the Canada and the Spanish Civil War project.
Ryan van den Berg is attending UBC for his M.A. in Educational Studies. He worked as a Research Intern on the Spanish Civil War project while completing a B.A. in Canadian Studies at Mount Allison.
Kevin Levangie has an undergraduate degree from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. His contributions to the project include a case study examining selections from the range of portrayals of Dr. Norman Bethune in biography. Kevin also contributed case studies on Bethune’s contributions to the Republican cause and about the public commemoration of Canadian Spanish Civil War volunteers. Early exposure to The Clash’s London Calling, and a general interest in leftist and anti-fascist politics brought Kevin to reading about the Spanish Civil War. These interests found a perfect outlet in his work with the Canada and the SCW project. Kevin’s areas of interest for continued study both inside and outside the project include cultural studies, critical theory, and leftist and working class literature.
Daniel Marcotte has an undergraduate degree from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Research Collaborators:
Stephen Collis (SFU) is a poet, activist, editor and professor. His many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; second edition 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013), and (with Jordan Scott)DECOMP (Coach House 2013). He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012), and a novel, The Red Album (BookThug 2013). In 2014, while involved in anti-pipeline activism, he was sued for $5.6 million by US energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers read his poetry in court. He lives near Vancouver and teaches at Simon Fraser University.
Patricia Rae (Queens) has reseach interests in Literary modernism in Britain and the United States, especially the genres of elegy and memoir, culture and politics in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, World War I, the theory and practice of mourning, elegy, commemoration, literature and the visual arts, and Imagism and Vorticism.
Erin Wunker (Dalhousie) is Chair of the Board of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts and co-founder, Managing Editor, and weekly contributor to the feminist academic blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She teaches in the fields of Canadian literature and cultural studies with an especial focus on poetics, gender, race, and intersectional feminism. She is the editor of Barking & Biting: Selected Works of Sina Queyras (LPS, 2016). Her monograph, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (BookThug) will be published in 2016.
Susan Brown (Guelph) holds a Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship. Her major areas of expertise are digital humanities, Victorian writing, women’s writing and feminist theory. Her research focuses on ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative scholarship and the methods and infrastructures that support such activity, as well as on feminist and Victorain literary history and the application of digital technologies to literary studies.
Dean Irvine (Dalhousie) is an associate professor at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, and the editor of The Canadian Modernists Meet, Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay, and Editing as Cultural Practice (with Smaro Kambourelli). He directs Editing Modernism in Canada, Agile Humanities Agency, the Canadian Literature Collection, and the Modernist Commons.
Christl Verduyn (Mt. Allison) is cross-appointed to Mount Allison's Department of English and the Canadian Studies Program. She teaches and publishes on Canadian literature and Canadian studies. She is the Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies and also Director of Mount Allison’s Centre of Canadian Studies. Before joining the faculty at Mount Allison, Christl Verduyn taught at Wilfrid Laurier University (2000-2006), where she was Director of Canadian Studies; at Trent University (1980-2000), where she was founding Chair of Women’s Studies (1987-90) and Chair of Canadian Studies (1993-99); and at Queen’s University (1979-80), following the completion of her Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa (1976-79).
Artist in Residence:
Michael McCormack is an interdisciplinary artist from Halifax. He was the founder and custodian of the McCleave Gallery of Fine Art since 2002 until the suitcase gallery merged with the Suitcase Art Gallery Space Research Institute (SAGSRI) in 2007. From 2009-2013 he worked as Director of Eyelevel Gallery and representative for the Association of Artist-run Centres from the Atlantic. He has co-curated exhibitions throughout Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, and Ireland, and exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries, festivals, and artist-run centres across Canada. Michael has recently finished his MFA in Intermedia at NSCAD University where he developed a new project titled BEACON. More and up to date information on this project and projects leading up to it can be found on his Shortwave Radio BLOG.
STATION (2014) is a sound installation presented inside the Faubourg’s elevator, which takes up the broadcasting of anti-fascist short-wave communications between Madrid and Canada from 1936 to 1939, during the Spanish Civil War. The elevator travels approximately the same distance as a single short wave on the frequency used by Canadian volunteers to transmit signals between the two countries (31.65 megacycles or 9.4786 metres). As this is the height of the floor of the building, the distance travelled provides an opportunity to replicate the temporal nature of the archival documents in the private setting of an elevator’s sound environment.
